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The release date for AMD’s Zen-based “Naples” CPU is still a few months away, but details about the new high performance server chip are already leaking into the public domain. Some of these specs are available in a recent report published at WCCFtech. Although much remains to be revealed, Naples is shaping up to be the first credible Xeon competitor that Intel has encountered in several years.

At the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh this week, an artificial intelligence program will challenge four professional poker players to determine if a machine can beat humans at the most popular gambling card game in the world. The program, known as Libratus, was developed by AI researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) using the newly upgraded Bridges supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

Like many tech companies, IBM is starting the new year by making a few predictions. One of them has to do with a software concept they call a “macroscope,” a software technology that can be used to analyze the complexities of the physical world. IBM predicts that within five years, such technology will “help us understand the Earth’s complexity in infinite detail.”

Hewlett Packard Labs has developed an optical processor that could tackle a class of computational problems not easily solved by conventional digital chips. The processor, which was developed in conjunction with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Mesodynamic Architectures program, houses 1,052 optical components laid down on a silicon-based substrate.

In June 2016, China leapfrogged the HPC competition with its 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Then in November it reached parity with the US on the TOP500 list in total number of systems and aggregate performance. But China’s supercomputing capabilities are in many respects still a work in progress.

As societies grapple with the initial deployments of artificial intelligence, governments are beginning to outline policy approaches to deal with the inevitable consequences – both positive and negative. In a report issued last month by President Obama’s executive office, the outgoing administration sets some broad public policy prescriptions on how the US government should respond to the disruption that AI is poised to bring to the economy.